S5 Ep. 7: Complicity, Corruption, and Accountability: Asali Solomon on The Days of Afrekete and the January 6 Investigation

fiction/non/fiction

Novelist Asali Solomon joins hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss accountability, the ongoing Congressional investigation into the January 6 insurrection, and her new novel. The Days of Afrekete, an Obama-era story, follows Liselle Belmont, a Black woman throwing a dinner party for her white husband, a politician who is suspected of corruption. As she considers her own personal and political choices, she flashes back to a lost love: her college girlfriend Selena. Solomon reads from the book and talks about depicting accountability and its lack, the intimate costs of being connected to power, and how Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Toni Morrison’s Sula, and Audre Lorde’s Zami influenced her storytelling. She also reflects on how reading the late bell hooks gave her a new vision of herself in the world.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

Selected readings:

Asali Solomon

• The Days of Afrekete
• Disgruntled
• Get Down
• Killing the Donald Trump in Us: How to Be Less Like the Man We Elected to Lead Us

Others:

• About | Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol
• Philadelphia keeps revisiting MOVE bombing history because we never truly learned it | Opinion
• Rashida Tlaib berates Mark Meadows for using black woman as 'a prop' at hearing - POLITICO
• Liz Cheney Takes Center Stage in Jan. 6 Inquiry - The New York Times
• Significant Other | The New Yorker
• House Seeks Contempt Charge Against Meadows in Jan. 6 Inquiry - The New York Times
• Meadows and the Band of Loyalists: How They Fought to Keep Trump in Power - The New York Times
• A Dinner Party About Lost Selves and Lost Chances - Electric Literature
• The Good Wife
• The West Wing
• Zami by Audre Lorde
• Sula by Toni Morrison
• Angela Davis
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
• bell hooks
• Black Looks
• Teaching to Transgress

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